On an October night, a small group gathers outside a restored railroad depot on Elbert Street, bundled against the Colorado chill, waiting to walk into the darker corners of Castle Rock's past. The tour they are about to take, Ghostly Stories and Tragic Tales of Castle Rock, is free, lasts about an hour, and begins and ends at the Castle Rock Museum. It is one of the town's most unusual traditions: a nighttime stroll through a quiet downtown that turns out to be full of ghosts, murders, and unfinished business.
The tour is the work of the Castle Rock Historical Society, which formed in 1991 when a group of concerned citizens decided the town's history was worth saving. They organized house tours through the historic Craig and Gould neighborhood, bus tours, and lectures. In 1996 the society bought the old Denver & Rio Grande Railroad Depot and, with a Colorado State Historical Fund grant and gifts from local businesses and the Town of Castle Rock, remodeled it into a museum that opened in October 1997. The society's members are especially indebted to Starr and Lionel Oberlin, whose drive and vision made both the society and the museum a reality. Today the depot at 420 Elbert Street still holds its original ticket window and baggage area, its walls covered in more than a century of graffiti.
The building itself is a piece of the story the tour tells. Castle Rock was first settled in the 1870s, named for the pale rhyolite butte that rises over the town. One of the original homesteaders, Jeremiah Gould, owned 160 acres south of "The Rock"; in 1874 he donated 120 acres to "be known as Castle Rock." The streets were laid out, Courthouse Square was designated, and 77 lots were auctioned for a total of $3,400. Within a year the new train depot brought the Denver & Rio Grande Railway to town, unloading supplies for ranchers and shipping rhyolite from three local quarries, along with cheese from surrounding dairy farms. The depot was moved from trackside to its present location in 1970.
The rock that gave the town its name has its own odd history. When explorer John C. Fremont passed through in 1843, he thought the peculiar pale formation looked like a "Poundcake Rock." Fifteen years later, gold seeker David Kellogg climbed to the top with friends, fired his gun into the distance, and christened the place "Castle Rock." Prospectors found no gold under the butte, but they found rhyolite, the stone that built the community. According to Colorado Life magazine, Castle Rock's trademark rhyolite is the result of a singular volcanic event: roughly 36.7 million years ago, a glowing avalanche of incandescent pumice fragments erupted from the Mount Princeton area near modern-day Buena Vista and eventually settled here.
Among the stops on the tour is the Old Stone Church, built in 1888 by parishioner and stonemason John Baptiste Ehmanon using local rough-faced rhyolite. It was Castle Rock's first Catholic church, with a rose window and a prominent steeple, and it now serves as a restaurant. The B&B Cafe, another stop, occupies a building dating to roughly 1918 and has operated as a cafe since the 1930s; the B&B name was registered in 1946 by Laura Barker and her son Howard. Inside, diners eat beneath an original pressed-tin ceiling and a marble back bar reportedly hauled in by railroad from Leadville in the late 1920s. The lore there is real: bullet holes preserved in the ceiling and back bar are tied to the February 1946 killing of Castle Rock Town Marshal Ray Lewis as he tried to subdue a fugitive from Denver.
Other stops reach further back. The Cantril School, at 312 Cantril Street, opened in 1897 as Castle Rock Elementary School and served the Douglas County School District; the two-story Italian Villa-style building was made from pink and tan rhyolite mined in Castle Rock-area quarries. Earlier tours have also included Hangman's Gulch, a name that carries a legend passed down for more than 125 years.
The Hangman's Gulch story is a good example of how these tales survive. Early Castle Rock history is full of undocumented hearsay handed down from the mouths of the first homesteaders, and some of it has stood the test of time without any hard documentation to prove or disprove it. The archivist Shaun Boyd, of the Douglas County History Research Center, traced the legend for a local newspaper article in the late 1990s. She found it in Josephine L. Marr's book "Douglas County: A Historical Journey," which in turn drew on an issue of Colorado Magazine published in 1947. The magazine's writer, Vauna Schultz, had documented the story from an interview with Albert Dakan, who was only three years old when his family moved to Castle Rock in 1870. Dakan recounted it from his parents, who had first heard it from early settlers they knew. His story dated to 1867, before Castle Rock was settled: a homesteader along East Plum Creek was murdered by two men passing through the county. The next day neighbors found the body, and the murderers were tracked to the area around Palmer Lake, where a search turned up several articles belonging to the murdered man.
The Ghostly Stories and Tragic Tales tours have become an October fixture. The nighttime walks run at 7 p.m. on October 1, 8, 9, 15, 22, 23, 29, and 30, with daytime tours on October 18 and 25 at 1 p.m. The tour is free, though donations are encouraged, and reservations are required. Participants are advised to dress for the weather. The society also runs a separate Cedar Hill Cemetery walking tour, a leisurely walk through graves dating to 1875, the only cemetery in Castle Rock, where pioneers significant to the early history of the town and Douglas County are buried. The downtown history tours, by contrast, run May through September at 10:30 a.m. and require no reservations.
What makes the October version different is the hour and the mood. The same streets that look ordinary in daylight — a depot, a church, a cafe, a schoolhouse — become a catalog of the town's tragedies once the sun goes down. The society's members describe the walk as a way to share the history of the Castle Rock area through presentations, tours, events, and activities, and the ghost tour is the most theatrical of them. It is history delivered as folklore, with the gaps and uncertainties left in place rather than smoothed over. The murderers of Hangman's Gulch were never definitively identified in the record; the marshal's bullet holes are still in the ceiling; the rock that looks like a poundcake still stands over the town. For an hour on an October night, a guide walks a small group past all of it and tells them what the town remembers — and what it only half remembers.
Reservations for the October 7 tour and the others can be made by contacting the Castle Rock Museum at [email protected] or 303-814-3164.